Preamble

Yesterday, I was sitting in a less than comfortable — though cheap! — chair, minding my own business, which is often humdrum, and I was feeling pretty good. I had gone on a run, and was now working on some items for my podcast.

It’s true. I, like 86% of sentient humans on this planet, host a podcast. It’s called Behind Beautiful Things. I’m really bad at promoting it, as is evidenced that I’m going to put more information about it in this footnote1.

Anyhow, I was working on my podcast, feeling lucky as I often do when doing this work, and that feeling of gratitude was helping my generally genial mood for the day. And then, without warning, I suddenly felt off. Sad, uneasy. This is unfortunately a rather common occurrence for me, and because of its prevelance in my day to day life, and lots of therapy, I’ve become familiar with the steps as they happen.

As I sat there, sitting with the uneasiness, I had an odd thought:

I’d like to try to explain this.

In my attempt to explain this, I am not looking for pity. Much like my OCD essay, I am writing this in hopes of helping someone else feel less alone.

Shall we?

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Approximately Four Seconds

To feel uneasy due to anxiety (a very broad word, though appropriate), is to experience a multi stepped process, and these steps are infinitesimal, and while they are brief, they contain multitudes2.

A breakdown goes something like this:

1. A thought occurs.

2. An emotion happens.

3. The emotion spreads.

4. I spend a second wondering why I don’t feel as good as I did just a moment ago while also trying to bring back that heretofore feeling of contentment.

5. If I’m lucky, I’m able to pinpoint what is taking place inside of me

   1. I’m often not lucky, and therefore am left both uneasy and confused, leading to a general feeling of frustration which leads to a broader feeling of displacement.

6. The emotion lingers, and brings with it more troubling thoughts

   1. Emotions lingering can mean different things to different people. For me, in most instances of anxious emotions, lingering equals profusion of thought and escalation of the pain within.

7. Troubling thoughts lead to more difficult, painful emotions.

   1. The layers build, and while they often share the same names, they contain wholly different emotional and intellectual land mines.

8. I try to fight the emotion from happening.

   1. If you’re bored, here’s the definition of futile.

9. The emotion laughs at me, has a seat, and makes itself comfortable.

10. Repeat until death.

To put it another way:

In this example, perhaps the thought has to do with longing. I miss a person, and that thought occurs to me, and then my stomach lights up like a light bright. Since forever I have felt this feeling in my stomach, a feeling of sweetness and discomfort, something that would almost feel good, if it also didn’t seem to portend doom.

My thought is now superseded by my paying attention to that feeling in my stomach, and when I pay attention to it, I realize, further, that it is a difficult feeling I’d rather not feel.

In general, I have spent my life fighting these uneasy feelings, as if I am the Washington Generals and the emotional uneasiness is the Harlem Globetrotters. Call me if I get within 25.

So, I think of missing someone, the feeling happens in my stomach, and because I’ve always treated that feeling as an intruder even though it is actually a part of my person, I try to dispel it immediately. The irony here being if you try to not think or feel something, the exact opposite of your wishes will occur.

Next, I feel something in my head. It’s almost always in either the center of my forehead, like right up front there on my (ever growing) forehead, or it’s in the pinpoint center of my brain. It kind of blankets the area, as if someone is throwing up my emotions like pizza dough, and letting them settle and coat my mind.

For those watching at home, a quick recap: Thought, feeling in stomach, distress at feeling in stomach, feeling in the head, distress at feeling in head.

As I fight these emotions, the longing behind my thinking expands in me like spilled ink. Last summer and fall I did a lot of work with Neuro Linguistic Programming3, and we would focus on these feelings, treating them as something the body is trying to tell me, pieces of my past spread taut between my spidering nerves. In the same way Inspector Closeau wanted to help, the sub conscious wants to help, but it often bumbles about, deputizing uncomfortable feelings who seem to be begging for cessation when what they are requesting is investigation and curiosity. Goodness knows I have spent a lot of my time doing everything I could in order to not feel these feelings. This is counterintuitive. Like the wishing for it to go away, ignoring it, acting as if you are too cool for school and this gadfly nerd feeling won’t get out of your space, that, too, incurs a deeper version of the same feeling, and if I am somehow able to move on from this feeling without understanding it, well, good news, that means it’s not going anywhere. It has just retreated, waiting until a certain thought, or trigger, brings it up again.

It is very difficult to catch the transition from feeling one way (good, positive, hopeful even) to now suddenly feeling off kilter and uneasy. The lack of explanation leads to a frustration inside me, something along the lines of:

Now wait a fucking minute, I was just feeling good. The sun was shining, I was being productive, and now I feel at sea, lost and on fire.

As if all this were not complicated enough, we now bring in another thought pattern on top of the original thought that started this whole carnival. This additional thought pattern takes aim at yours truly, incensed that I would be so human as to have emotions and thoughts. This thought pattern is likely an ever-burning ember of a pattern that started a long, long time ago. I presume it started for a reason that at the time made sense, but it has long since stopped making sense. It is a form of self flagellation that presents itself as logic, but what is logical about destroying oneself?

For all the veneration we heap upon it, the brain is a profoundly stubborn organ. We build these thought patterns as children to survive, and even though our brains develop, and we grow and we learn, these patterns got in the door early, and are burrowed and entrenched like ticks.

Now we are in perhaps decade long patterns of thought/emotion/thought/self flagellation which is really not doing anyone any good. By this point, I feel as if I’m being overwhelmed by the whole situation. The emotions grow and grow until I feel like they are going to get caught in my windpipe or tear a hole in my stomach. I sometimes feel so much pain, gallons of it, and the pain can be broken down as above, but when the pain is coating me, taking from me my logic and hope, it feels as if it is main element of my being. In the best instances of this, I only (only, he says) turn the growing pain and panic into a weapon against my own heart. You may look over at me and see what my friend Rodney described as me “swimming in it.” My eyes will look drawn, it will suddenly seem as if I haven’t slept in some time, hope and light are replaced by lethargy and indifference, and I wall myself off, isolating from any perceived pain or help.

But oh, in my worst moments, it comes from me like fire. As if I am saying to the world:

I don’t want this pain! I don’t want this pain! I don’t want this pain!

Maybe I even go so far as to opine, internally, that I don’t deserve this pain, which then makes me feel wronged, further frustrating me. If there were an Academy Award for playing the victim I’d have more Oscars than Edith Head.

This is all happening in what seem to be milliseconds, but if you have gone through this as many times as I have, it is something that does start to reveal itself to you, if you want it.

The revelation presents the opportunity wherein The Washington Generals (me fighting the feeling) have a fighting chance to beat The Harlem Globetrotters (the uneasy feeling within me).

Because here comes a white knight called awareness, and it brings an elongating of split second changes, an understanding of how a thought can make the whole world turn upside down in the time it takes to snap your fingers. It brings a road map to healing. It brings relief. However, awareness is not an easy companion. It is, for me at least, an exhausting gift to receive, but without it, these patterns continue, this pain deepens, and hope evaporates.

Final recap: Thought, feeling in stomach, distress at feeling in stomach, feeling in the head, distress at feeling that in my head, spreading of unease, self flagellation, distress rising, frustration, pain looking to get out, collapsing in my own solipsism.

Time elapsed: About four seconds.

Wonder

The wonder of emotion is that it is not the real world, it only masquerades as the real world. Yet our society reinforces the idea that emotion is reality, because, among other reasons, emotion drives engagement, and engagement means dollar signs in the eyes of some guys who are way too into MMA. Not all emotion is negative, but negative emotions often feel like the world entire.

Then again, I’m a guy who recently ran in place in front of the mirror while blaring the Pixies4 in my headphones. So, who can say, really?